Germany’s Spiegel reports that Deutsche Telecom is developing its own e-reading device to compete with the likes of Kindle and the Sony Reader (neither is currently sold in Germany). One engineer says their device is likely to be larger and have a flexible display. France Telecom’s Orange also has an electronic reading device in development.Story translated/summarized in Bookseller
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Report Cites Rough Patches in Scholarly Presses' Transition to Online Access – Chronicle.com
The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, calling the essay on Scholarly Press Initiatives by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel “a page turner.” The authors “confirm what many observers have already concluded: The transition to e-books has not been as smooth and as rapid as Mellon (and many others) thought it would be. In the late 1990s, the foundation decided ‘that books would quickly follow journals into online distribution and access,’ so it put money behind two e-monograph projects, Gutenberg-e and History E-Books. The results were, to say […]
Putting a Price on AbeBooks
TechVibes–where former ABE executive (and still director) Boris Wertz is also a director and investor–estimates a price tag for Amazon’s recent purchase of $90 million to $120 million: “According to the AbeBooks website, in 2007 they did $190 million in gross merchandise volume and had 13,500 bookseller members on their platform. Based on AbeBooks’ 13.5% combined commission/service fee and minimum monthly subscription fee of $25, AbeBooks’ revenue in 2007 was approximately $30 million. If you look at comparable online e-commerce businesses like eBay with a current market cap of $32 Billion and 2007 annual revenue of $7.6 Billion, it’s safe […]
Another Kindle Guess
If you did had a dollar for every reporter with an inside source who tells them how many Kindles have really sold, you’d at least be able to buy some Amazon stock. Now TechCrunch has decided their source isn’t playing them, and declares in a headline: “We know how many Kindles Amazon has sold…. 240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.” Not even a source at Amazon, but “close to Amazon.”TC
Amazon.com to Buy AbeBooks
Amazon can lay ever-bigger claim to being the largest independent bookseller in the world with today’s news that the etailer has agreed to acquire AbeBooks. The online marketplace says it offers “over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world.“ Amazon vp of books Russell Grandinetti says, “As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide. AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further […]
How About WOWIO 2.0?
Remember that goofy company that wanted to build a collection of free-access ebooks that wasted all that money a couple of BEA’s ago on an army of people in matching t-shirts chasing attendees on Segway scooters? Now entertainment company Platinum Studios (which says they control thousands of comic book characters) has bought the company and relaunched the site. They say that “prior to the acquisition and relaunch, WOWIO had over 2 million downloads in a year,” with partners including Rosetta Books, Taylor & Francis Group, and Soft Skull.Release